Index
At IBM's Index developer conference in San Francisco, on Tuesday, The Register sat down with Big Blue's Java CTO John Duimovich to talk about the Java programming language, IBM, the cloud and other developer-oriented concerns.
Duimovich made the case for IBM as a cloud platform partner, based on the company's Java expertise. …

Index
At the first IBM Index developer conference in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, I spent the morning at a Kubernetes workshop learning that when apps on the IBM Cloud Container Service fail to deploy, the reason may not be obvious.
The presenter, IBM cloud program manager Chris Rosen, framed the event as an opportunity to …

A bloke is suing Verizon Wireless in the US because, he claims, personal pictures from his Verizon phone, including intimate snaps of his fiancée, turned up on the phone of another subscriber – who happened to know her.
"On February 8, 2018, the plaintiff discovered for the first time that Verizon’s advertisements about the …

Yet again an insider has been caught misusing a workplace computer system to conduct identity theft and fraud.
Unusually, the perp was, at the time, serving as the head lawyer for the US government's Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Office of Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA) at the time. And rather than turning to the …

Apple last month fixed a flaw in macOS and iOS that allowed a text message to crash its chat software (CVE-2018-4100) – and now it has the opportunity to do so again.
Various macOS, iOS, and watchOS apps that rely on Apples's text-rending code can be crashed when sent a message containing a symbol composed of characters used …

When details of the Meltdown and Spectre CPU security vulnerabilities emerged last month, the researchers involved hinted that further exploits may be developed beyond the early proof-of-concept examples.
It didn't take long. In a research paper – "MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime: Automatically-Synthesized Attacks Exploiting …

Starting tomorrow, Google, which makes most of its money from online advertising, will begin blocking egregious ads in its Chrome browser under limited circumstances – though it would really rather not.
The reason, explained Chrome veep Rahul Roy-Chowdhury in a blog post on Tuesday, is that some ads suck.
"It’s clear that …

Having last year axed its scanning of Gmail messages after years of withering privacy criticism, Google has decided to court controversy again in this area.
Now it is extending its much-loved Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology to email inboxes.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney announced …

Bit boffins from universities in China and the US have devised a way to tamper with deep learning models so they produce misleading results.
In a paper posted to pre-print service ArXiv, "PoTrojan: powerful neural-level trojan designs in deep learning models," authors Minhui Zou, Yang Shi, Chengliang Wang, Fangyu Li, WenZhan …

Apple's fruitless attempts to remove its leaked iBoot source code from the internet have escalated into requests to have community code site GitHub disable all downstream forks made from identified infringing repositories.
In a DMCA takedown notice sent to GitHub on Sunday and published on Monday – its sixth since the …

Analysis
The sudden departure of a developer from GitHub, along with the Go code packages he maintained, has underscored a potential security issue with the way some developers rely on code distributed through the community site.
The individual identifying himself as Jim Teeuwen, who maintained GitHub repository for a tool called go- …

Unable to convince Oracle to allow the use of its trademarked term "Java" to refer to the open source version of Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE), the Eclipse Foundation is asking those who care about such things to vote on proposed names for the software project.
Last summer, Oracle said it had begun working with the Eclipse …

The organization overseeing container juggling system Kubernetes has decided to befriend a storage project.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) on Thursday said its Technical Oversight Committee voted to to bring Rook into its stable of open source projects, a group that includes Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, …

Having defeated a defamation claim for speculating that using Grsecurity's Linux kernel hardening code may expose you to legal risk under the terms of the GPLv2 license, Bruce Perens is back in court.
This time, he's demanding Bradley Spengler – who runs Open Source Security Inc and develops Grsecurity – foots his hefty legal …

Three years ago, Google's search engine began favoring in its results websites that use encrypted HTTPS connections.
Sites that secure their content get a boost over websites that used plain-old boring insecure HTTP. In a "carrot and stick" model, that's the carrot: rewarding security with greater search visibility.
Later …

Analysis
Remember when Uber tried to cover up the fact its AWS datastore containing records on 57 million riders and drivers had been hacked? And that it bunged the hackers $100,000 to shut them up, and then disguised the expense as a bug bounty payout?
Who could forget? Certainly not shocked US lawmakers, who held a hearing in …

Thirteen out of 36 individuals indicted for their alleged involvement in a transnational cybercrime group know as Infraud have been arrested, the US Department of Justice announced on Wednesday.
The Infraud Organization, according to prosecutors, coordinated various flavors of internet fraud including identity theft, bank …

Google's mobile telecom service Project Fi is billing customers for internet data delivered over home and public Wi-Fi networks, according to a lawsuit filed in the US on Monday.
The claim, submitted to a San Jose district court in northern California, alleged that Google is charging Project Fi subscribers for data it doesn't …

It turns out bullshitting your way to fame and fortune is illegal in California's playground of tech startups, rather than a viable business model. Who knew?
The former CEO and founder of defunct Silicon Valley upstart WrkRiot has pleaded guilty to defrauding and lying to his firm's former employees.
Isaac Choi, 36, on Monday …

While the world worries about savvy computers taking people's jobs, it may want to focus more on how to retrain its men, who are evidently ill-equipped for work that's increasingly social.
For a research paper titled "The 'End of Men' and Rise of Women in the High-Skilled Labor Market," presented by the US-based National …

Analysis
Technology platform companies depend on third-party developers to such an extent that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously turned his company's codependence into a mantra, repeating "Developers! Developers! Developers!" as a sign of appreciation.
Almost two decades later, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and …

Feature
Twenty years ago, the Open Source Definition (OSD) was published, providing a framework for the most significant trend in software development since then, and building upon Richard Stallman's prior advocacy for "free software."
The Open Source Initiative, a non-profit that advocates open source development and non-proprietary …

Amazon.com said its Q4 2017 net sales reached $60.5bn, an increase of 38 per cent from the $43.7bn reported by the tech giant during the same period a year earlier.
Analysts had been expecting somewhat less, $59.83bn, according to Thomson Reuters.
The earnings were revealed on Thursday, and lifted the book-selling, server- …

Despite its astonishing reputation for obliterating HR policy, resisting transit regulations and bending other laws, taxi scourge Uber is rather keen to keep its code clean and ensure it follows the rules.
Developers working for the ride app biz have created a software analysis tool called NEAL to enforce code quality, and …